An article published this week in PLoS Medicine discusses the ethics of research on US lethal objection protocols. The authors conclude: While lethal injection and the death penalty present a host of ethical questions, the specific, pressin…

Today, British MPs approved the government’s highly controversial plan to extend pre-charge detention of suspects to 42 days. This proposal initiated a discussion, though unfortunately still fairly sparse, on Britain’ s headlong way t…

The Food Standards Agency in the United Kingdom has released the results of a study it commissioned on public sentiment about cloned animal meat, reports James Meikle in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/06/foodtech.f…

Abortion remains a crime for most Australians. Laws are inconsistent between states. In contrast, long ago the UK Abortion Act 1967 repealed and replaced its antiquated legal statutes on which much of Australian abortion law is still based.…

The Daily Mail reports this morning that 8 clone-offspring cows have been born in the UK. Also today, the first survey of public opinion on ‘clone farming’ has been released indicating significant unease and opposition to the idea of meat p…

Personal DNA testing is here. For $1,000 you can send off a DNA sample to an american company and find out your genetic predispositions to a wide variety of illnesses and problems, from male pattern baldness to cancer. The Telegraph is runn…

The Guardian leader today drew what it called a crude distinction between “two sets of people who both want to fight climate change”.   Some think we can carry on more or less as we are while pursuing technological means to counte…

The Royal Bank of Scotland has donated a state-of-the-art three dimensional CT scanner to an Edinburgh hospital, but with strings attached. The scanner will be available for use by NHS patients, but the Bank wants its staff to have priority…

Not a day seems to pass without some news on the possible catastrophic impacts of climate change. International politics aims at establishing binding regulations for greenhouse gas emissions – but quite rightly gets accused of only paying l…

     Earlier this month Greenpeace released a report entitled ‘False Hope’ attacking carbon capture and storage (CCS) on the grounds that it ‘wont save the climate’ and that it therefore presents us with a false hope. (See: h…